Focus areas of our autumn program 2012 are architecture, design, art, and photography.

With its unique bags made of used materials, the Freitag company of Zürich is now an established commercial success, selling 300,000 of its design products around the world every year. How can a bag achieve that kind of cult status? How did a small, creative start-up become a large brand with a strong identity Freitag – Out of the Bag investigates this story. Extensively illustrated interviews with the brothers Daniel and Markus Freitag and their coworkers and collaborators in the fields of product design, manufacturing, distributing, and marketing offer a look behind the scenes at the company, which manages as a brand to embody — through often humorous and ironic communications strategies — the paradox of an individualistic mass product.

Authoring: Re-placing Art and Architecture challenges traditional assumptions about the relationship between art and architecture. From 2008 through 2010, David Adjaye, along with Marc McQuade, taught three studios at the Princeton School of Architecture. Each studio focused on a collaboration with three distinguished artists—Matthew Ritchie, Teresita Fernández, and Jorge Pardo—on interventions in three vastly different sites: the state of New Jersey, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, and the city of Mérida in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Through an exploratory process of questioning, developing, and testing, each architect and artist reexamines the expectations traditionally associated with the conventions of architectural design and representation. Authoring: Re-placing Art and Architecture presents recent projects from David Adjaye, Matthew Ritchie, Teresita Fernández, and Jorge Pardo, along with interviews, essays, and archival material that unpack the shared space of art and architecture.

With contributions by David Adjaye, Stan Allen, Alex Coles, Teresita Fernández, Dave Hickey, Sanford Kwinter, Jorge Pardo, and Matthew Ritchie.

From 2008 to 2010, Madrid based architects Luis M. Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón held the Jean Labatut Visiting Professorship at the Princeton School of Architecture. More than a collection of student work, From Rules to Constraints is a wide ranging reflection on teaching, design practice, history and the city. Focusing on three sites at three distinct scales, this book examines the constraints of the architectural project—social, political, historical, and environmental—in order to create new rules for working. Examining both their teaching methods and Mansilla + Tuñón’s own design work, the book presents the design process as an ongoing conversation between the building and the environment, between freedom and limits, and between the decided and undecided.
 
LUIS M. MANSILLA and EMILIO TUÑÓN are internationally recognized for their intellectual contributions and influential designs and buildings.  In 2007, they received the prestigious Mies van der Rohe Prize for their Museum of Contemporary Art in Castilla y León (MUSAC) in León, Spain, and in 2003, the Spanish Architecture Award. Their current work includes The Spanish Royal Collections Museum in Madrid, Lalín Town Hall, and the International Convention Center for the city of Madrid. In February of this year, as this book was nearing completion, Luis M. Mansilla passed away, making this one of the last records of his work and ideas.

GIANCARLO VALLE is an architect and editor in New York City.

Using a typological structure (landscape, park, square, garden, promenade, etc.), Günther Vogt describes the theoretical foundation on which the successful projects of Vogt Landscape Architects are based. In recent years they have realized international projects in Europe and the United States, including a new type of city park for the Tate Modern in London (with Herzog & de Meuron); an “all-weather garden” with great poetic power at the Hyatt Hotel in Zurich (with Meili, Peter
Architekten); an indoor tropical garden for the Novartis Campus in Basel (with Diener & Diener); and the exterior spaces of the Allianz Arena in Munich (with Herzog & de Meuron). The updated edition shows the finished projects that were presented as plans in the previous edition.

For Climate’s Sake! sets itself the goal of conveying the knowledge revealed by current climate research in a manner that is both concise and appealing. It differs from other books on climate change principally in the way it is conceived as a visual reader that deliberately uses the effectiveness and power of the image to present the theme in a graphic way. Extensive series of images with large photographs and informative diagrams accompany well-researched essays on and around the themes of climate history, research and policy and thus offer an in-depth examination.

The book provides insights into the history of the earth’s climate and reveals the factors that are responsible for climate change. It poses questions and provides answers: why is the earth becoming warmer? What are the consequences we must reckon with? What can we do against this? Who determines the future? As both a volume of illustrations and a reader For Climate’s Sake! Is directed at all those who want to equip themselves with knowledge and understanding to confront what is probably our planet’s most pressing problem.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Blumen sind seit Jahrtausenden ein universelles Kulturobjekt. Sie sind nicht nur weltweit ein wichtiger ästhetischer Bestandteil des Alltags, sondern waren stets ein symbolträchtiger Topos der Kunstgeschichte. Mit seinen «botanischen Installationen», in denen er aus Pflanzen, Blumen oder deren Bestandteilen ungewöhnliche neue Formen zusammenstellt, hat Makoto Azuma im Laufe der letzten Jahre in der Kunstwelt für Furore gesorgt. Ausgehend von der japanischen Tradition des Ikebanas – der japanischen Kunst, Blumen zu arrangieren – erschafft Azuma neuartige, nie gesehene Ästhetiken, indem er ungewöhnliche, auch exotische Pflanzen, die in der Natur niemals aufeinandertreffen würden, zu erstaunlichen Arrangements zusammenfügt.
In einzigartigen Fotografien hielt Shunsuke Shiinoki, der mit dem Künstler zusammen 2002 in Tokio den «Haute-Couture»-Blumenladen «Jardin des Fleurs» eröffnete, die aussergewöhnlichen floralen Installationen in einer eigenständigen Bildsprache fest.

Buildings by Chinese architect Wang Shu—this year’s winner of the Pritzker Prize—feature clear and simple contemporary designs that make use of traditional methods and materials. The reuse of building materials is characteristic of his buildings.

Shu’s design process always begins with an intense study of the location. The architect spends as long as possible on the site, absorbing its atmosphere. He then produces drafts in the form of hand-drawn sketches, creating them in relatively quick succession. Imagining the House follows this process in various buildings. Photographic documentation of the locations elucidate Shu’s on-site research. The reproductions of drawings in this book demonstrate how the designs change and become more concrete over the course of the process. The book provides unique insights into the work of an architect who has hitherto received little attention in Europe, thereby addressing a considerable omission in the publishing world.

While Floating Images: Souto de Moura’s Wall Atlas explores the architect’s visual archive as the basis for his work, Sketchbook No. 76 focuses on his concrete sketches. The publication is a reproduction of his sketchbook and gives insight into the architectural design process, which here can be quite literally experienced and understood. The publication records his first ideas, fleeting sketches, studies, and spontaneous jottings that offer a starting point for every project but also function as a working resource for developing existing ideas further and trying out any number of variants. Sketchbook No. 76 is a homage to the medium of drawing and makes it clear that it remains an essential element of the creative process.

The works of Sou Fujimoto resist any form of conventional categorization. This young Japanese architect stands for unconventional buildings that cannot be described by standard criteria and definitions such as inside/outside or public/private. Clear divisions such as between floor levels and rooms are shattered by his complex ground plans and interlocking structures which—in a reference to the idea of the cave—he describes as “primitive future.” With this approach he creates forms that are committed to a playful interaction between user and space. Alongside private residences, such as the well-known N House, his library for Musashino Art University has achieved particular recognition. In addition he was represented at the 2010 Venice Biennale with a design for a house.

In his personal sketchbook Sou Fujimoto offers insights into his design process. Through the sketches, drawings, and notes readers can trace how his complex concepts are made manifest and develop on paper.

Kenzo Tange (1913–2005) is a peerless figure among twentieth-century Japanese architects, unmatched in his talent, influence, and versatility. This collection of essays represents a new generation of original research that reframes Tange in the context of Japan’s unique embrace of modern architecture as well as global discourses of cultural identity, technology, and the synthesis of the arts. Case studies on celebrated works clarify Tange’s wide-ranging interests and design methodology through collaboration with allied fields such as art, engineering, furniture design, and photography. The book will appeal to both specialists and general readers with an interest in the visual culture and built environment of modern Japan.

This volume addresses the complex relations between urban artifacts and urban life. The contributions show how architects, planners, and urban designers describe and give shape to the city, while novelists, humanists, and other scholars examine its operations and performances. The essential question is: How does the physical character of an urban environment influence or enable the events that take place within a specific setting? Contributors from a wide range of fields address the role and life of cities as diverse as Baku, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Detroit, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Paris, Quito, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tirana, and Toronto. Portfolios of contemporary photography present the layered realities of urban life today.

With contributions by Arjun Appadurai, Eve Blau, Svetlana Boym, Lindsay Bremner, Jana Cephas, Felipe Correa, Rahul Mehrotra, Mohsen Mostafavi, Antoine Picon, Gyan Prakash, Nasser Rabbat, Rafi Segal, Jorge Silvetti, AbdouMaliq Simone, and Charles Waldheim.  

Torre David is an incomplete skyscraper in the center of the Venezuelan capital Caracas that has been occupied and reconstructed by local residents. Work on the building, named after the financial investor David Brillembourg, who died in 1993, was suspended during the Venezuelan financial crisis of 1994. After the office tower—the third highest in Venezuela—had stood empty for many years, it was taken over by the local population in 2008. The occupants made the building their own with improvisation and skill—it is a “vertical favela,” now containing not just housing but also other everyday facilities such as an improvised doctor’s office, shops, and more. Photographer Iwan Baan has documented Torre David and its occupants, creating a portrait that captures the contradictions of the place while at the same time revealing urban structures that have emerged dynamically and without planning.

Photographs, newspaper cuttings, postcards, drawings, and slides: on entering the studio of Eduardo Souto de Moura, winner of the Pritzker Prize 2011, one is confronted with a variety of images on the walls that engage in a dialogue. How do these photos, drawings, and illustrations impact his design practice? What is the relationship between the image and the completed building? Floating Images: Eduardo Souto de Moura’s Wall Atlas uses this question as an opportunity to examine the architect’s visual universe. He has added images from his extensive collection of drawings and project sketches and reorganized them in this atlas. Complex relationships are formed between the individual illustrations and projects. Essays by Pedro Bandeira, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Diogo Seixas Lopes, and Philip Ursprung round off the publication and provide a contextualization in terms of the history of art and images.

In 1936 the first and only issue of the magazine telehor (Greek for tele-vision) was released in four languages, as a special edition on and by László Moholy-Nagy. To celebrate its 75-year anniversary a facsimile reprint of the magazine will be produced, accompanied by a commentary volume.

The reprint makes the magazine accessible again in terms of its artistic and theoretical-historical dimensions. Particular attention has been paid to the production process. Thus the volume appears spiral-bound, an ultramodern technique in the
mid-1930s. The commentary contains an editorial statement that places the magazine, telehor, in the context of the art and media of the 1920s and 1930s and unlocks the position of the artistic avant-garde at the intersection of two epochs.

With a text by Giedion Siegried